Milice

The Milice ("Militia") was a fascist paramilitary organization created by Vichy France's prime minister Pierre Laval on 30 January 1943. The group took part in assassinations and executions, and the militia rounded up Jews and French Resistance members for deportation to Nazi concentration camps. Joseph Darnand was the commander of the Milice, and he used torture and interrogation tactics to intimidate the French people; the French considered the Milice to be worse than the SS or Gestapo, as they understood local dialects and had informants in several towns and cities. The paramilitary had between 25,000 and 30,000 mebers before August 1944, when the Allied liberation of Paris led to the end of the German occupation and the fall of French collaborationism.